Beginner's Guide for PC players
Hotkeys / Shortcuts *Pressing 'L' while the mouse is over an item in your box will lock/unlock it. (Locked items will not be sold via the "Sell All" button.) *Holding "Ctrl" when adding points to your character on level up will add 120 (the maximum at once). *Holding 'Shift" when adding points to your character on level up will add 5 at a time. *When adding points to your character, the Right Mouse button will subtract recently added points, and can be used in tandem with the above shortcuts. *G = Activate next wave without having to be near a crystal. *M = Drop all mana, good for feeding your tower builder, or when swapping characters during the Build Phase. If you accidentally use "M" to drop all your mana you will be able to pick it back up after 20 seconds. *F1 or ~ = Chatlog *C = Call out to your teammates. Drops a floating green arrow for them to see, and marks the point on the map for ~10 seconds. *+/- resize Monk auras and Huntress trap triggers. This does not affect the trap area of effect. This can be useful to prevent or even cause chain reactions when the effect radius of one trap overlaps the trigger radius of an identical trap. *You can view the details of any characters on the map quickly by hitting Esc, then selecting a hero icon and clicking the "Hero Info" button. *You can reorder your characters in your character list by selecting one, holding the 'Alt' key, and then selecting another. *You can auto-fire as an Apprentice/Adept by holding the Left Mouse button, then also holding the Right Mouse Button. You can also hold Mouse1 while clicking Mouse2 to time and fire your charged shots. *Middle click: you can sell towers with the bottom right icon. *Middle click --> Hero: The option to detonate traps is here. You can detonate any players traps. *Middle click --> Defenses: You can see a brief summary of what each tower/defense does here, as well as place them. Options *You can toggle the "Auto-follow" of melee attacks in the options, which causes you to automatically move towards your enemy as you attack. *Go in Options, Controls tab, Uncheck : Step towards melee target Loot *All remaining mana / items on the floor during a build phase will be auto-sold and split evenly to players upon starting the next Combat Phase / Going to the next level. "Returning to Tavern" will NOT do this. *Since the map can only hold a limited number of items at a time (~300 items in a 4-player map), on maps with over 1000 enemies, it is advantageous for all players to continually collect all the loot until ~600 mobs remain. This way, there will still be 300 items left to sell, and each player can use the forge in each building phase to "Sell All" the loot they picked up. This can dramatically increase everyone's earning potential, particularly in later Survival waves where there are many thousands of enemies. *When holding Shift to view the map, loot will be represented as grey dots. Green dots represent loot that the computer calculates to be "better" than your current equipment and therefore worth immediately equipping by pressing F (You may not agree with the computer's assessment). In your normal view, pairs of small green arrows will indicate loot that the computer thinks is superior, even if you cannot currently equip it due to level constraints. *The Tavern has several Testing Dummies which can be used to gauge your DPS. The one to the left of the Forge in particular can be targeted by pets/familiars. *Information on specific rewards. The Perfect Drop Compendium does not include Nightmare rewards. **Perfect Drop Compendium **PC Challenges **Map Rewards (PC) **Survival Rewards *Information about where to find items once you have reached level 74 can be found at the Loot Progress Path for Dummies *The Tavern Shop refreshes its inventory upon the successful completion of any mission. The more difficult the mission, the better the items in the shop will be. *Your Item box can hold 15 pages (with Challenge rewards being added to a temporary 16th page). *You may also add items to your AFK shop from the Tavern, without setting a price, thus storing them for later retrieval, while noone else can buy them. *You may also drop items onto the floor of your personal tavern. If you have "Tavern Pickups Locked" checked, noone else can pick these up, and they will remain in your tavern. *If you want to leave Tavern Pickup Locked unchecked, just drop the items inside your 'Secret Room' (unlocked after completing the campaign), and noone else can find them. Tips *Check each tower stat by hitting "E." It will show you the amount of kills your tower has, so you can determine if you are wasting points by placing towers in bad positions. *All your towers/traps/auras will have the stats of the last weapon, armor, and pet you equip before swapping that hero. *Reaching wave 15 (finishing wave 14) of Survivor or Pure Strategy on any difficulty will give you a familiar specific to the map that you are playing. Finishing Survivor or Pure Strategy(finishing wave 25) results in a special familiar that boosts your stats more than typical familiars but has no other effect or attack. The quality of the familiar is affected by the difficulty level that it is obtained in. *You can host a game and make it private. Press Esc and then in the top right, toggle the show / hide match button. This way you can later open it up to a group if you please. *Press shift to see the map. If something is flashing, it needs repairing. Check the map for flashing things and repair/upgrade all things between rounds(unless specified otherwise). *Sometimes you might not want to upgrade something because upgrading repairs a defence a lot faster than repairing. So if you think you will need to repair things later on during battle, you might want to not upgrade them. *Always leave a gap between your wall(barricade, etc) and your towers. If the towers are too close to the wall and the enemy attacks the wall, the towers will also get hurt. This is extremely important when defending vs an ogre, where you dont want the ogre to kill both your wall and your towers at the same time. Not to mention that it is a lot easier to keep repairing/upgrading 1 thing than all the things. *Tower build characters have limited uselfulness once you hit defence unit cap. After the first couple rounds, when the du cap is reached, change to a dps character, like a huntress. Obviously if you dont have some other high dps character, you are better off with what you have but ideally you want to have a specialized dps character. However, keep in mind that while the character who originally built the tower is on the map and alive, all their towers receive a 30% damage boost. *If you are a dps character, once the game starts, go around and gather mana and give it to your tower builders. This is especially useful, since dps characters usually are extremely fast so they can zoom around the map, gathering mana. This is very important when doing missions on insane difficulty, since you dont have infinite build time. Avoid wasting mana on skills for the first couple rounds, use it for building or upgrading things if possible. *Your hero's attack stat only affects the physical dmg of your weapon. If your weapon doesnt do physical dmg, your hero's stat isnt that useful. Conversely, if you aren't putting many points into your Hero Attack stat (E.G. a Tower Builder), you may get better results by using a weapon with high elemental damage and upgrading that (elemental damage upgrades faster than physical damage.) *Sometimes weapons do elemental damage but in the stats it says physical. Some weapons behave a lot differently from one another. A weapon may have high base damage but swing slowly and have less damage per second than a faster weapon with lower base damaeg. A weapon could have a shorter range, it hitting less enemies. Use practice dummies to experiment for single target dps. Use practice games to see how far one weapon reaches and what it does. Some huntress weapons pierce enemies, others do huge splash damage. If you are curious how effective an item will be but don't want to waste mana upgrading it, export your file to Open, then upgrade the item in Open and see how it does. Your main Ranked file will be unaffected. Some examples of differences in weapons are shown here: http://dungeondefenders.wikia.com/wiki/Extensive_Weapon_Effectiveness *In the build stage, any tower you build can be sold for its full value. Note that if you upgrade it you will lose the mana you spent on upgrading. *The map shows the icon of each enemy on the map. It also shows the difficulty of the creature, it will change from white-ish for easy targets all the way to red for the most difficult. Creatures are purple on Nightmare difficulty *In your tavern you can see the dps of your character and towers (does not work for auras). For traps you have to manual detonate the traps (Mouse Wheel menu->Hero->Detonate Traps) at the training dummies. *If a tower is down on health you can see the health bar anywhere in the level, just look in the general area of the tower. If you do not see the health bar it means the tower has full health. *Mana/items that fall into the lava are gone. If you sell a tower while having full mana, the mana from the sale is gone. Character Stats Stat Progression Graphs *The maximum number of points that a player may put into each stat/ability is 120. Stats from weapons/armor/pets can go well beyond this, however. *There is no realized benefit to the running speed statistic past 99 points. *Investing points into the same stat yields diminsihing returns, as shown in the Stat Progression Graphs Pure Strategy *In Pure Strategy games the enemies do not have any immunities *While you may not repair your structures during the combat phase of pure strategy, you can upgrade them. Upgrade can be used as a way to keep your structures from being destroyed during the combat phase. In later phases it is even advised to replace your high level structures with lower level ones so that they will be able to be upgraded to make it through the enter wave. The Adept's Instant Upgrade ability may be able to be used on any structure(even 3 star) to repair it at any point in Pure Strategy. Category:Guides